Fossil Sex in South Australia

Fossil sex in South Australia described in an article in Adelaide Now, 24 March 2008. Researchers from the Museum of South Australia and University of California, Riverside claim they have found the world’s earliest evidence of sexual reproduction. They have been studying the fossils of a tubular animal named “Funisia Dorothea” found in Ediacaran rocks from the Flinders Ranges dated as 570 million years old. They found the animals in clusters of five to fifteen individuals all of similar age – a pattern called “spats” that occurs when large numbers of bottom dwelling animals are spawned at once and they all find their foothold in the sea floor at the same time. This pattern would not occur if the animals reproduced by randomly breaking off shoots. Mary Drosser, one of the researchers explained: “In general, individuals of an organism grow close to each other, in part, to ensure reproductive success. Among living organisms, spat production results almost always from sexual reproduction and only very rarely from asexual reproduction.” She went on the say that the findings indicate “that ecosystems were complex very early in the history of animals on Earth”. This contradicts theories that claim the earliest forms of life were simple creatures that reproduced asexually.

Editorial Comment: Whilst we don’t agree with the time frame, we agree with the comments that the first living creatures were complex, and lived in complex ecosystems right from the start and from before any sediments had been laid down rapidly to fossilise them. Genesis tells us that after God had created the physical environment of land and sea and provided plants for food and habitat, He then filled the various ecological zones with all the different kinds of creatures that would live in each one and reproduce after their kinds. It comes as a shock to most evolutionists to be reminded that finding extinct creatures does not actually provide any evidence such creatures evolved, but it is one consequence you would expect from reading the Biblical history of a good world going downhill. (Ref. palaeontology, Australia, reproduction)